Russia and the Middle East

Walking on a tightrope

Russia is not so much leaning towards the Arab world as desperately trying to keep its balance

ANYONE watching Russia's recent Middle East diplomacy might conclude that it is trying to recapture the golden age of Soviet-Arab friendship. This month Syria's vice-president was in Moscow to talk about “closer relations”, with hasty denials that Russia plans to help Syria build a nuclear reactor—as it is doing in Iran, with several more planned. Meanwhile Iraq said yes to deals with three Russian oil companies, including a previously cancelled project for Lukoil, Russia's second-biggest oil company, to develop the huge West Qurna-2 field. And Russian officials went to Saudi Arabia, huddling with OPEC to agree on oil output levels that will ensure a nice price for all.

And that is just one month's work. Last year, says Mikhail Bogdanov, head of the foreign ministry's Middle East and North Africa division, was choc-a-bloc with Arab state visits and co-operation agreements. Russia, he insists, never distanced itself from the Arab world.

All this may unnerve some of Russia's newer western allies. The Bushehr reactor project in Iran is “not only a danger to the region, but to Russia's own long-term interests,” said the American ambassador to Moscow, Alexander Vershbow, recently. But such frenetic Russian diplomacy in the Muslim world is really little more than a veil for the fact that Russia is now far closer to another Middle Eastern country: Israel.

This was partly inevitable. Even in the old days, Syria, Iraq and Libya were the only big buyers of Soviet arms, and those sales have dwindled. With the cold war's end, Russia's strategic need to be close to the Arab states evaporated too. “Russia doesn't have enough money to finance significant projects in the Middle East, no big economic interests except for the oil companies in Iraq, no military clout anymore, and it's still seen as treacherous by many Arab regimes because they think Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin [Russia's former presidents] unjustly abandoned them,” says Konstantin Eggert, editor of the BBC's Russian service in Moscow and a former military translator. Talk of multi-billion-dollar projects—four years ago it was an arms deal with Syria, last year it was huge investments in Iraq—tend to dissolve into thin desert air.

These days Russia and Israel have much more in common. Both their governments are increasingly fed up with west European criticism of how they handle their respective conflicts in Chechnya and Palestine. Russians, says Yuri Shtern, chairman of the far-right Israel Beiteinu party and himself an immigrant from Russia, don't boycott Israeli products; Russian pop singers don't stay away from Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians. He thinks that Russia, already a member of the peacemaking quartet that includes the United States, the European Union and the UN, could become a closer ally of Israel.

Quid pro quo, Israel's leaders help Russia smooth over its differences with America, even those that ought to disturb Israel just as much. “Ariel Sharon has been an important asset in winning over the US on a number of foreign-policy issues, like blunting US criticism of Russia,” says Vladimir Frolov, the deputy staff director of the Russian parliament's foreign-affairs committee. Israel takes care not to criticise publicly Russia's repression in Chechnya, and the two countries' special forces swap experience and training. Thanks to the Chechen conflict, with its increasingly radical-Islamic undertone, Russians have a growing distrust of Islam and sympathy for Israel, especially after the bloody events last year, when Chechen rebels took hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theatre in October and suicide-bombers blew up Russia's administrative headquarters in Chechnya in December, each incident leaving more than 100 dead.

Even on oil, Russia circumvents the Arab world when it has to. It may be cosy with OPEC now, but a year ago it was quietly breaking agreed production limits. And a plan to start pumping Russian oil this year through a disused Israeli pipeline from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea would both ensure Israel's oil supply and help Russia break the Arab states' near-monopoly on selling oil to Asia.

Russian-Israeli connections reach into domestic affairs too. Israeli politicians go to Moscow at election time to woo Russian television stations, which still reach the 15% of Israelis who immigrated from the former Soviet Union. Amram Mitzna, Labour's candidate for prime minister in Israel's upcoming election, would have a better chance were it not for his almost total lack of support among Russian-Israelis. Russia's politicians, for their part, now cultivate ties with Jews at home; some are powerful in business. The anti-Semitism that infected Soviet thinking is now, says Evgeny Satanovsky, head of the Russian Jewish Congress, “the last in a long queue of other Russian xenophobias”.